About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

FEAR THE WORST
by Linwood Barclay
Doubleday Canada, August 2009
416 pages
$29.95 CAD
ISBN: 0385668023


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Linwood Barclay's stock in trade is the intrusion of evil into suburban ordinariness and on the whole, he's done it very well and done very well by it. This time around, the ordinary man is a Toyota salesman named Tim Blake, separated from his wife who has moved in with a somewhat sleazy used-car dealer, star of a grating TV commercial. Tim's daughter, Sydney, seventeen, is living at Tim's house for the summer while she works on the front desk of a local motel.

Tim's good at his job and, while he misses his wife, has found a new if somewhat whacko girlfriend and is quite happy to let things happen as they will. Happy, that is, until Syd fails to come home from her job one evening. Days pass, she remains missing, and, when he checks at the motel, no one has ever heard of her.

The police are not terribly interested in helping. "Kids today," they seem to be saying and the woman officer assigned to the case spends as much time talking to her own obstreperous kid on the phone as she does listening to Tim. But then Syd's car is found with traces of blood on the door handle and events begin to heat up.

Tim's wife left him because she felt he lacked ambition, but he is nothing if not committed to finding his daughter and saving her from whatever she has got involved with. But there are others who also want to find the girl and they do not wish her well. By the time it is all over, the tension has mounted and so has the body count.

It is a familiar pattern, reminiscent of Barclay's two previous stand-alones, effective still for all that. The premise is one that speaks to the fears of all parents, and the theme of the teenaged child who may have a life she has been hiding from her father is irresistible. As well, Barclay provides a satisfying variety of plot twists and red herrings to keep us going to the end. Nevertheless, this does not come up to the earlier novels for one reason or another.

In the first place, Tim is not as likeable as he might be, and not simply because he sells cars for a living. He isn't as clever as we would hope and jumps to obvious conclusions, sometimes dangerously. Too many of the other characters are not sufficiently likeable, either, so I steadily lost patience with the lot of them as the action progressed.

On the back jacket of my copy, Barclay is touted as "Canada's current thriller king," oddly since although Barclay is unquestionably Canadian, he has not set any of his suburban thrillers in this country. I can't help wondering if the thinness I am beginning to detect might not be remedied by an at least experimental move north of the border. At the very least, it would be nice to see Muskoka or Val-David described with the same loving attention to detail that Barclay lavishes here on Stowe, Vermont.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2009

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]